Meeting:Board meeting 2011-07-06

Fedora Board Meeting, 2011-July-06

• Secretary: Jon Stanley
• Meeting type: Phone

Attendence

Present

Jared Smith Jon Stanley Guillermo Gómez Peter Robinson Rex Dieter Rudi Landmann Tom Callaway (Invited guest) Joerg Simon (late and gobby only) Toshio Kuratomi (late)

Not Present

Jaroslav Reznik

Regards

David Nalley

Agenda

Updates Board business

Updates

• Welcome to new members of the Board
  • Welcome to the first phone meetings
  • Meetings every week (can discuss today)
    • Alternating phone/IRC meeting
  • Send agenda items to jsmith or board-private
• Fedora 16 Schedule
  • Feature freeze on 7/26 (about 3 weeks out)
  • Feature submission deadline 7/12
  • Custom spins submission deadline 7/12
  • key tasks at http://rbergero.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-16/f-16-key-tasks.html
  • Schedule at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/16/Schedule
• Update on FUDCon {EMEA/APAC/NA} status
  • Working on coming up with a list of tickets that should be opened for any FUDCon to make it easier to keep track of
  • EMEA in Milan on 9/30-10/2
    • Planning going well
  • APAC - decision is imminently forthcoming,
    • Opening bid for next year as soon as this year's decision is announced (schedule is to do Mar-May next year, in Red Hat fiscal Q1)
  • FUDCon NA Jan 13-15 in Blacksburg, VA.
    • planning meetings start today
  • Possible FAD to evaluate FUDCon planning process (after a FUDCon)?

Board Business

• FPCA discussion (with Tom Callaway as an invited guest)
  • When Fedora got started, CLA (specifically Apache CLA) was mandated by Red Hat.
  • Interpretation worked for most people, however the text was very confusing
  • Spot started working on a replacement, working with Red Hat Legal to draft
  • Allow explicit licensing, but have a safety net license
    • by agreeing to FPCA, you give permission to use under default license IF UNLICENSED otherwise.
  • FPCA was not mandated by Red Hat Legal (and significant staffing changes since CLA was mandated)
  • Having a default licensing agreement makes sense, don't want to go towards copyright assignment
  • Other projects have similar agreements, for example Asterisk.
  • the hope when the FPCA was crafted was having something legally valid, but still understandable
  • For the most part, positive feedback from FPCA
  • Reached out to people that found the CLA objectionable, universally they had no issues with the FPCA.
  • Requiring explicit licensing is a bearucratic nightmare
    • Would have to build mechanisms to block non-explicitly licensed content.
  • Where do you put/how to check license files in say, JPEG files?
  • We would have to build gates around every possible area of contribution
  • Seems the objection to the FPCA is not that they don't want to sign the FPCA but that it's "hard" to sign the FPCA
    • Would it be better to address those specific usability problems?
  • i18n of FAS/FPCA
  • To be clear, none of the solutions we are evaluating would allow unlicensed contributions to Fedora
    • In the US, at least, there's only minimal rights associated with things that have no license, therefore, we would be on shakey legal grounds if we accepted contributions without license terms
  • Third parties have approached us that were not comfortable contributing to Fedora with either the CLA or no agreement in place, however, they were comfortable with the FPCA.

PROPOSAL: Do we drop FPCA as being mandatory in favor of explicit licensing of all contributions?

- Board unanimously votes against the proposal.

Other notes

• Next meeting: Public IRC meeting on Wednesday, July 13th

 - Need to figure out meeting time
 - We'll ask FPC to re-visit their schedule, and if they don't feel like moving, we'll find another time